Pinball FX 2

It has taken a little while longer than expected, but Zen Studio’s Pinball FX 2 platform is now readily available for the Xbox One. The free pinball platform has become a staple of every platform that it has launched on over the past couple years. Zen continuously rolls out great tables consistently and has really breathed new life into the pinball genre thanks to their digital offerings. Now, Xbox One owners can take advantage of all their great offerings with what may be the best version of the Pinball FX platform to date.

From a technical standpoint, the Xbox One version is up to par with what you would expect with the new generation of consoles. We’re talking about a full 1080p resolution and 60 frames per second on both your favorite classic tables and the new releases coming down the line. It still supports all of the same worldwide tournaments and achievements fans love and best of all, and the interface has been drastically improved over the previous editions.

Rather than all of your tables being crunched together on a single screen, your tables are now sorted into panels based on the set they belong to. Of course, it all depends on which tables you own, but conceivably there are individual panels for the Star Wars, Marvel, and the Zen originals. Things don’t seem nearly as cluttered as they used to and it flows together really well. There is also a “new” panel that highlights recent releases for the platform, which is the default screen you get when you launch the game.

I absolutely love the new layout and design of the interface and hope that it comes to other platforms via a title update soon. It is just so much easier to read the table titles and sort through your collection. This has really been my only complaint about the platform in the past and this is a great solution.

As I am sure you know, the reason that Pinball FX 2 was delayed on the Xbox One was so that Zen and Microsoft could work out a way to import previously purchased tables. This is a feature that I personally feel makes or breaks then entire Zen Pinball experience, and when it was originally announced that you wouldn’t be able to do it on the Xbox One, I felt it was pretty much a death sentence for this version. Luckily though, that has been fixed and you can now bring nearly all of the tables that you have already purchased on your Xbox 360 to the new generation.

The import process for your old tables isn’t that bad, but it is a little more complicated than the experience has been on other systems. On the PlayStation platforms for example, there is simply an option to import tables from your previous purchases; you click the button, you wait, and then a download list appears with all of the titles you have previously purchased. On the Xbox One, you have to go into each table that you owned and basically go through the purchase process again. If you have previously bought the table, then the prices will be reduced to zero and you simply click through as if you were buying the table from the in-app store.

Please note that there will be a few tables that are not available for importing right now. If you happen to own any of the following tables, you are going to have to wait for a future title update in order for them to become available on your Xbox One:

• Earth Defense
• Excalibur
• Marvel Pinball: Original Pack
• Street Fighter II
• Plants vs. Zombies
• Super League Football

Hopefully support will be added very soon for these tables, particularly Plants vs. Zombies (one of my favorites).

For some strange reason, the Microsoft Marketplace requires you to have a valid credit card on file in order to download previously purchased items. That doesn’t make a lot of sense since you can normally download any items priced as free without having a card on file. I wouldn’t have known this had my card not happened to have expired last month and it is just an oddity that I happened to notice. I wasn’t able to download my old tables until I updated that information. This isn’t anything that I would criticize the software for, but something I think you should be aware of in case you run into the same issue.

All in all, this might be the best version of Pinball FX 2 available on the home consoles. It doesn’t differ from the others performance-wise, but the interface really makes the experience more enjoyable and user friendly. Of course, that is once you jump through the little hoops to import your tables, which isn’t that painful. This is one title on the Marketplace that every Xbox One owner should have installed on their system.